Quoting Andrew McGlashan (andrew.mcglashan@affinityvision.com.au):
If the data isn't too great, then I am sure that I can volunteer to do remote rsnapshot backups; that will mean hourly (16 per day), daily, weekly, monthly and yearly backups.
I'm listadmin for (among other groups) BALUG in San Francisco, and recently heard to my shock that they are doing _no backups_. They're trusting to the hosting service, Dreamhost, which recently broke Pipermail archiving and hasn't fixed it. Here is some correspondence from me that includes some half-assed but sufficient cronjob scripts that you're welcome to borrow if you wish or cross-check against. In short: if you periodically get a mailing list's cumulative mbox and an ASCII dump of its roster including fullnames, you have captured all of the essentials, and the 2% you miss doesn't matter much. Larger point: the 98% job you actually do because it's not difficult beats the 100% job you keep meaning to do, every time. Quoting Michael Paoli (Michael.Paoli@cal.berkeley.edu):
Hopefully just a DreamHost SNAFU and they'll have it fixed uh, ... "soon enough". In the meantime the BALUG lists aren't working (can't access archives, and subscribe attempts fail, etc.). Was still working as of sometime on 2013-07-12, but apparently broken by sometime on 2013-07-14 (I noticed the archive URLs were returning HTTP 404 errors) and confirmed 2013-07-15 (email to lists bounce).
Thanks for the heads-up, and for the informational note on the BALUG front page. Reminds me, though: Do we keep offsite copies of the three cumulative mbox files, and of mailing list rosters? (There are better ways to capture GNU Mailman state, but those are the core of what is needed to, if necessary, replicate the mailing lists elsewhere with no lossage.) Here's a primitive shell script on lists.svlug.org as /etc/cron.weekly/mailman-rosters that mails an ASCII dump of that host's mailing lists' membership rosters to several people: #!/bin/sh # # mailman-rosters: Cron script to mail out current Mailman mailing list # rosters. # # Written by Rick Moen (rick@linuxmafia.com) # $Id: cron.weekly,v 1.02 2011/03/29 16:35:05 rick set -o errexit #aka "set -e": exit if any line returns non-true value set -o nounset #aka "set -u": exit upon finding an uninitialised variable test -x /usr/bin/mail || exit 0 test -x /var/local/mailman/bin/list_members || exit 0 # /var/local/mailman/bin/list_members -f jobs | mail -s "Jobs Roster as of $(date +%F)" rick@linuxmafia.com dmarti@zgp.org # /var/local/mailman/bin/list_members -f officers | mail -s "Officers Roster as of $(date +%F)" rick@linuxmafia.com dmarti@zgp.org # /var/local/mailman/bin/list_members -f smaug | mail -s "Smaug Roster as of $(date +%F)" rick@linuxmafia.com dmarti@zgp.org abcruzww@gmail.com # /var/local/mailman/bin/list_members -f svlug | mail -s "Svlug Roster as of $(date +%F)" rick@linuxmafia.com dmarti@zgp.org # /var/local/mailman/bin/list_members -f svlug-announce | mail -s "Svlug-announce Roster as of $(date +%F)" rick@linuxmafia.com dmarti@zgp.org # /var/local/mailman/bin/list_members -f volunteers | mail -s "Volunteers Roster as of $(date +%F)" rick@linuxmafia.com dmarti@zgp.org /var/local/mailman/bin/list_members -f web-team | mail -s "Web-Team Roster as of $(date +%F)" rick@linuxmafia.com dmarti@zgp.org Note that the -f flag on Mailman's bin/arch utility means provide fullname + e-mail address, one line per subscription, e.g., "Rick Moen" <rick@linuxmafia.com> And this is an entry in host linuxmafia.com's /etc/crontab file, where the script uses a special SSH keypair to do the job of backing up lists.svlug.org's Mailman mbox files to linuxmafia.com: 3 15 * * * root rsync -e "/usr/bin/ssh -i /root/.ssh/svlugbackup" -ax "lists.svlug.org:/var/local/mailman/archives/private/{jobs.mbox,officers.mbox,smaug.mbox,speakers.mbox,svlug-announce.mbox,svlug.mbox,volunteers.mbox,web-team.mbox}/" /usr/local/src/rickstuff/svlug/mboxes The point is not that either of those is particularly good, merely that they exist and do an essential job, week in and week out. Thus my question: Is anyone bothering to do that job? If not, that's putting a heck of a lot of trust into Dreamhost over the preservation and continuity of BALUG's history. SPoF.